FEDAURA Project
Fedaura Home Objectives News Links Publications Contacts Partners Only

Fraud is a general problem facing many sectors of commerce and industry. The FEDAURA Project is aimed at taking forward novel technology from academic research to show how it can address the problem of fraud in financial claims processing. The project will allow the full commercial potential of the University research to be realised. For demonstration purposes, the work is focused on the Benefit Claims sector. However, the commercial partners will evaluate the methods for use in other areas of business, based on the results gained from the project.

Fraudulent Benefit claims and clerical errors are estimated to cost UK taxpayers between £2.5 and £7 billion per year, within a total benefit bill of around £100 billion per year [BA]. The major objective in the FEDAURA Project is to find methods that help identify fraudulent benefit claims, thus lowering the cost of fraud to the UK. It aims to demonstrate that the AURA technology under development at University of York can be readily adapted and scaled to address such real-world problems. The potential savings for the UK are considerable, and the effect of nullifying only a modest proportion of frauds could have a significant impact for the UK. The DWP aims to reduce benefit losses from fraud and error in Income support (IS) and Job Seeker's Allowance (JSA) by 25% by 2004 and by at least 50% by 2006. DWP believe that the project has the potential for making savings in the levels of fraud and error and directly contributing to the achievement of the target.
[BA] BA internal Command paper, March 1999, A New Contract for Welfare: Safeguarding Social Security.

Despite the potential benefits, the scope for improvement is limited by the performance of currently available technology. New, powerful methods of pattern detection are now available within University research that can be applied to this problem with many potential advantages. In particular, an extension into non-linear and probabilistic classification methods may bring large savings for the DWP. This project will assess and develop these new methods for application within the problem of fraud.

The project will allow the development of AURA technology in new application areas, with knowledge of its application to be transferred to leading software consultancy companies. It will also allow an SME to develop the technology ready for market. In addition, the partners EDS, Sema and DWP have no experience of AURA based methods, and the project will disseminate the utility of these methods in comparison with other neural methods to them.

There is an element of risk in the project since the technology developed may not perform as well as expected, and the commercial potential may be substantially reduced, or even negligible, in that event. This risk aspect means that the FEDAURA Project described here could not take place without additional support from the DTI MI Programme.

Home     Description     Objectives     News     Links     Publications     Contacts     Partners Only